The morning sun bled through the tall windows of the Noah estate, casting long, sharp shadows across the medical wing. But the room no longer felt like a place of healing. Over the last four hours, Adam had removed it of its softness. The comfortable chairs had been pushed into the hallway; the soft, amber lighting had been replaced by the clean, blue-white glare of the heavy-duty monitors he had Elias drag from the server room.Adam stood in the center of it all, his posture weirdly straight. He wasn't wearing the noise-canceling headphones anymore. He didn't need them. The signal leak that had nearly melted his brain hours ago was gone, replaced by a sharp silence that felt more like power than peace.[Integration Status: 86%][Neural Load: 12%. Status: Optimized.]He didn't feel the burden of the ghosting anymore. When he looked at Sophia, he didn't see three versions of her shifting out of sync. He saw one woman, exhausted and emotionally weak, whose utility was currently at sixt

The hum of the servers in the medical wing was the only thing filling the silence after Elias followed Sophia out of the room.Adam didn't notice their absence. He was deep in the zone, his eyes tracking the violet streams of data that flowed across his vision. The integration had reached a point where the laptop in front of him felt like a secondary limb. He didn't need to think about the commands; he simply willed them, and the system executed them with a speed that would have made his old self dizzy.He felt energized, almost manic. Every few minutes, he would pace the length of the room, his mind racing through legal loopholes and financial trapdoors. He grabbed a fresh can of caffeine from a small cooler he had moved near his desk, popping the tab and drinking it down in three long gulps. He could feel the rush of adrenaline in his chest every time a new asset bar for the Dryst family turned from green to red. But Liora Dryst was not going down without a fight. She was a brute in